The Do-Right (13 page)

XVII
XVII

“HEY, TOM, HOW'S the investigating business?”

“Doing all right, Miles. How's the lawyering?”

“Besides the eighty hours a week, I can't complain. Listen, you still on that case with Daughtry?”

“No, but it's still on me, if you know what I mean.”

“Well, I heard something last night that called our conversation to mind. I was at an Oil and Gas Development dinner. My brother-in-law, the Ph.D., was getting a plaque for some sort of packaging design.”

“Like Christmas wrapping?”

“Near enough. Couple guys hanging out in the bar mentioned your case. They were skipping the speeches—”

“Since you weren't giving one.”

“Bull-shitter. These guys were three, four sheets to the wind. Talking about the deal Daughtry and Enroco cut on a formula for a new oil-based drilling mud. I got my bourbon and just stood with my back to them. These guys were slinging terms around, diesel, additives, those're easy ones, but couldn't help you with the particular emulsifiers, polymers, whatevers. Want the scuttlebutt I
could
understand?”

“Lay it on me.”

“I had to bend over backward. All this time I'm thinking,
What, what's so hot about it, man, what?
Then the first guy said a mud not made out of diesel but ordinary old vegetable oil.”

“Talking Crisco.”

“Not a clue. But they had a hardon for this formula.”

Phelan knew why. Contamination. Of water, fish, wetlands. Hell, dry land. But he let Miles tell him, people liked to tell things. And part of what Miles said surprised him, after all.

“Diesel'll kill fish. If it runs off into fields, it'll kill the crops. They're not too worried about that. But whatever this vegetable formula is, it
fertilizes
crops.”

Neither Miles nor Phelan said anything for a while.

“OK.” Phelan cleared his throat. “So Daughtry had this vegetable formula. Enroco got ahold of it somehow, Daughtry sued. How are they gonna prove who had it first?”

“Besides testimony from the guys who invented it? Notes. Logbook. Chemists keep a log of their development process. All down there. Day by day. Year by year.”

“OK, and a logbook could be copied.”

“If someone had the original to copy from.”

“Right. Maybe there were dueling logbooks. Maybe just one. Whatever—either Enroco's lawyers or Lloyd Elliott managed to broker a deal between them and Daughtry. A payoff. Or percentages of a future product. Or both, how the fuck would I know?”

Phelan caught himself—shouldn't say stuff like
How would I know
out loud. Private eyes were supposed to know or find out.

“How much did Lloyd Elliott get out of it?”

“All negotiable. Everything would be on the table.”

His adrenalin had risen, stupid, given the zero peso return. This case was dead as a crab in crude, but it wouldn't stop skittering sideways.

“Just thought you might like to know. And, well, I'd like to throw a little business your way.”

“All ears.”

“We settled a case for a guy a while back, and now he's bugging me with some family problem he's got. Calls every day.”

“What's he want?”

“A leg. Here's the phone number.”

Phelan wrote it down. And waited.

“Don't let him play poor on you, he can pay. And how. Make him lose my phone number forever, and we're square for a favor in advance.”

“I'll take the deal. You gonna tell me about the leg?”

“God, no. Let him. Please let him.”

Phelan laughed. “Will do, Miles, owe you a drink. Or a bottle. What'll it be?”

“Milk. The wife's pregnant.”

“Well, hey, congratulations.”

“Thanks. We're pretty excited, first grandkid for both families. Gotta go. If Mr. Fortram loses his Jag to Mrs. Fortram, he's gonna drive one of his Ford 250's through my office. But I guess in your line, you know about divorces.”

“Apparently not enough.” Phelan thanked him and hung up. Daughtry seemed to lose but won. Enroco won. That was happy. Who lost? Phelan could think of a few possibilities.

The chemist. Think about watching something you invented pull in millions for your boss and squat for you. But he was dead. Maybe the assistant chemist, who was not? He lost. Margaret, long-time secretary, Our Lady of the Keys? But she hadn't lost her job. She was moving to the new office. Neither of them was likely to be blackmailing the company lawyer.

He'd check out that angle though, yes he would. Not right this minute but some minute very soon and without telling Delpha Wade. Now he would clock in on the Leg Case. One that Thomas Phelan, Private Investigator, would like
to conclude satisfactorily in order to make the world less crummy for Miles Blankenship, Esquire, Attorney-at-Law.

James T. Miller, Jr., a.k.a. Private First Class J.T. Miller, retired, a.k.a. Nutbox, had two hostile siblings and an artificial leg. Thoroughbred of a leg, courtesy of a deluxe insurance policy owned by the trucker who had T-boned him after burning through a cherry red light. Mr. Miller was cut out of his '61 pickup and ferried away to Baptist Hospital, bleeding from most of his natural orifices and several newly opened ones. To hear him tell it—and Phelan had been required to hear Mr. Miller narrate it twice—James Miller had died on the table that midnight and floated up beyond his own body on a net of gold light.

“Wasn't white light?” Phelan had asked, just to interrupt the flow of the second telling.

“No, gold as 24-carat. With sparkles,” Mrs. Miller put in, her tone solemn.

James, stump and rolled pant leg propped up on a coffee table, elbowed her and went on. There he lingered, hammocked on gold light beneath the ceiling tiles while surgeons cut away the leg the 18-wheeler had turned into strips and mush. Then he was sucked through a reddish channel wide as a good-size drainage pipe. Standing at the other end was his granddaddy who shooed him on back into the operating room.

“He didn't wanna come back. Not even to me.” Mrs. Miller was ten years younger than her husband, a row of barrettes shaped like some kind of birds perched in her blondish hair.

“I'm telling this, Linda. You just go on.” James hiked a crutch toward the kitchen and his wife went. He was a naturally wiry guy around thirty-five whose forehead sported
creases already. Hadn't pumped-up his pecs and biceps, he might have weighed one forty and looked something like James Dean would have looked if he'd limped away from the Porche Spyder. A weight set and bench sat in the living room blocking a tall entertainment center.

James was proud of the leg. It fit the stump comfortably, bent smoothly at the knee, and had the right size foot so he could buy a regular pair of shoes just like anybody else. Or so Phelan understood from his wistful description because Mr. Miller was no longer in possession of his leg.

“You sure the police handed it over?” Phelan asked. Since he had an in with E.E., if the police were still holding it, he'd just have had to go down to the station and negotiate.

“Yeah. They showed me the paper. My brother Byron signed for it. Byron.” Hurt and injustice compacted James Miller's forehead creases. “My big brother. I'd a walked hot coals for him, he asked me. Byron told them he was taking it to me. Cops got what they wanted and washed their hands of it. Said it's a family matter now.” James Miller laughed sourly.

“Why would your brother and sister want your artificial leg?”

James turned to gaze out the window where there was nothing to see but an alley of grass and the side of the next house. His face was fixed hard. A muscle in his cheek twitched. “Jealous, maybe. I got this settlement.” He waved his hand at the room as though toward stacks of gold newly spun from straw. “But I paid the price for it. They ain't.”

OK. Phelan would leave that alone for now. He flipped open his small notebook. “Now tell me again why the police came to have it.” He had some notes from a newspaper article Delpha had dug up. And he'd read it in the paper in the first place. But he wanted to hear his client's version. That part of
the story had been rushed by for the sake of the celestial light, which an astounded James Miller still favored above little details like his getting shot.

“OK, I was at Barney's having a few beers and got into it with this know-it-all motorcycle rider. Beard, long hair—kid looked like a haystack with tattoos. He claimed Cassius Clay that calls himself Muhammad Ali was better than Joe Frazier. I said, “No way, no how.” Now I didn't mean Ali can't fight, 'cause he can. What I meant was character. Ali dodged the draft. Joe Frazier didn't call him down for that. Hell, he testified to Congress
for
Ali, said they should let him back in the ring. Then come the Fight of the Century, Ali danced around calling Frazier Uncle Tom, callin' him a ugly gorilla.”

Phelan murmured, “Fighting words. James, could we—”

“You said it. Fighting words. Ali promised if Frazier won, he'd crawl across the ring and admit Joe was the greatest. Well, Frazier won. Fifteen damn rounds. Unanimous. And Ali didn't admit shit! Listen here, in '64 Frazier won a Olympic gold medal with a busted left thumb. Didn't tell nobody he had it, just kept fighting for the U.S. of A. That's heart. That's balls. You understand that? Some people don't.” James Miller's unshaven chin stuck out and his eyes burned.

“I'm not arguing with that. Appreciate your viewpoint. But cut to it, OK?”

Miller shot Phelan a sullen glance. “First tell me who you'd vote for.”

Phelan had complicated feelings in the matter, but he knew the right answer here. “Smokin' Joe, straight down the line.”

His client grinned and raised a crutch. “A'ight. Me and this hairy kid's arguing, and it got out of hand. Got hot. Bartender told us to shut up. Kid rared around and cussed at him, and bartender jerked his thumb and told us both to get
out. Longhair growled, ‘Make me.' Bartender snapped a wet rag in his face, stung him good.”

“That was…” Phelan consulted his notebook for newspaper details. “Mr. Roy Breedlove, the bartender.”

“Guess so, I don't know. Man, did I laugh. That's when he did it.”

“Did what?”

“Asshole pulled out a little special and shot my leg. Knew it was a prosthetic and shot me anyway!” James Miller made a face that Phelan judged a pretty fair reproduction of his original shock and aggrievement.

“Cops claimed they had to take my leg for the bullet. Kept it for six weeks. That's ridicalous—six weeks I been crutching around. Then they say I can have it. My brother Byron says he'll pick it up and goddamn him, I wouldn't never of believed it, he pulls this stunt. You gotta get my leg back. I can pay you. Got a little settlement money left.”

James Miller cracked his knuckles and looked away, all around the small living room, past an old short-back rocker with a box seat upholstered in faded brocade, possibly his wife's heirloom since the rest of the furniture looked to have just had the price tags yanked. Oak, high-varnish gleam: glass and veneer coffee table with three
Redbook
magazines Mrs. Miller had artfully fanned, oak-veneer entertainment center that held the 21″ TV, stereo and turntable housed in smoky gray plastic, Harvest Gold wall-to wall shag. He looked anywhere but at Phelan. He had the money, all right.

“But your brother signed for it. Asking him to give it back to you didn't work?”

“Said he gave it to my sister Sherry. That bitch. All my life she called me Nutbox, not James. That's shaming to somebody. That's hurtful. Kids at school took it up too.”

“I'll need names and addresses.”

“Linda! Bring that paper you wrote!”

Mrs. Miller hurried in from the kitchen with a sheet of tablet paper and a can of Schlitz, which her husband promptly drank from.

“You want one too, Mr. Phelan? I'd a brought it, but I figured maybe because you were working—”

“Should of brought one anyway, darlin'. That's just plain manners.” James Miller looked at Phelan, one etiquette expert to another, shaking his head like
What you gonna do?

“No, thank you. You're right. Just need the list.”

“Good. Go get 'em.” Miller levied himself up from the couch and hopped over to the weight bench, lay down. “Turn on the TV, sugar.”

Phelan took his list and his leave. Mrs. Miller followed him to his car. Maybe, Phelan thought, her way of making up for not offering him a beer right away. But that turned out not to be it.

“Can I ask you a question, Mr. Phelan?”

Phelan managed not to say, Shoot. “Sure.”

Her smooth young face, two streaks of blusher up high on cheekbones she didn't have, looked daunted. “You like this lipstick shade? It's V.I.P. pink.”

“Real nice.”

She frowned a little. “That's not really what I wanted to ask. It's this. James' daddy passed last year. His mama's off her head with hardening of the arteries, and they just put her in Restful Ways. You know, the nursing home? They don't believe she's got long. Now I think, because Mr. Miller's already there, he'll be waiting to pull Mama Nettie on across. But James is young. What I wanna know is, if you were on an operating table dying and had a chance to come
back to your wife, wouldn't you want to? Would you go off and leave her?”

James hadn't mentioned his mother's decline. Phelan nudged this bit of information aside to try to answer the wife's question. He opened his car door, rummaging around for something to say. The moment dragged on.

Her eyes were flat. “No bullshit,” she said. “This is serious to me.”

Phelan's grandfather had liked calling
Bullshit!
on politicians, the federal government, and neighbors. Shorter-tempered all the time, he was years older than his wife. The evening after he died, Phelan, fourteen or so, had entered his grandmother Lila's house unburdened by the weight of sorrow. If he'd thought about it at all, he'd have thought she would feel the same—only reasonable, the man was
old
and when you get
old
, you
die
. But he'd found Lila bowed like a storm-crushed primrose on their bed. Phelan felt ashamed when he saw how deeply wrong he was: she told him in a yearning voice that if Grandpa were to come through the door again and hold out his arms to her, she'd go back with him tonight.